To create different cookie varieties, one “tweaks” a basic formula, resulting in a plethora of possibilities.
We mentioned about that formula or ratios concept in a 28Nov2011 post.
Today’s blog post mentions one of those other ingredients commonly found in cookies…fat.
Holiday Baking – Cookies and Their Ingredients Part 4 Fat
In our 28Nov2011 blog post on Flour, we noted that a classic Shortbread cookie ratio of sugar:fat:flour is 1:2:3.
Let’s focus our attention now on what is sometimes the second largest ingredient found in cookies: fat. Of course, you won’t find it in meringue cookies per se, but it is in most other types of cookies.
Fat:
Fat contributes many sensory components to cookies (mouthfeel, texture, etc.) and is also involved in the spread of any cookie containing it when the cookie is baked.
Centuries ago in the US, butter churns enabled anyone who could use one to separate out butterfat from milk.
As a young child, I can remember the milkman coming to the house to deliver the milk bottles and sitting right at the top of each bottle of whole milk (what children drank many decades ago) was a layer of rich cream. My mother would remove that layer of rich cream and use it in her’s and my dad’s coffee, while the milk that remained was primarily consumed by my brother and myself.
Anyone who has ever overwhipped cream (or found out that a student almost did that during that split second the instructor was working with someone else, but having a sixth sense, turned around just in time to prevent that disaster) knows you can indeed take 30% fat content whipping cream or higher fat content heavy cream and turn it into butter!
•Examples of where some (but not all) typical fats found in baked goods, including some cookies, come from include:
- unsalted or salted butter +/or margarine;
- spreads/blends that are somewhat lower/reduced in fat and contain other ingredients such as yogurts, etc.;
- full-fat or lite aka neufchatel cream cheese;
- full-fat or lite sour cream;
- full fat or lite ricotta;
- full-fat or lite cottage cheese;
- full fat or reduced fat grated cheeses;
- full-fat and reduced-fat creams/milks;
- fat-containing buttermilks;
- sweetened condensed milk;
- evaporated milk;
- egg yolks or whole eggs or whole egg substitutes, such as Egg Beaters™;
- nuts, as well as nut butters like peanut butter;
- chocolate and other baking chips/morsels/bits;
- gelatin-free yogurt, including double protein Greek yogurt choices;
- oil from various sources;
- mayonnaise (cakes)
- shortening;
- lard/suet; and even
- bacon fat in the South (which already has added sodium in it to actually bring out some of the sweetness when used in baked goods).
•When professionals bake with fats in cookies, the majority of the time they use unsalted products. In that way, a professional can better control how much measured salt is added as needed in the recipe to achieve consistent results. Often the salt will be mixed with the flour that is incorporated into the recipe, but not always.
•Regular butter and regular margarine (salted or unsalted) are about 80% fat in content.
Butter typically contains 16% moisture, and then the rest of the butter that isn’t fat is solids. (Clarifying butter in cooking provides an opportunity to remove these other solids).
•If there is more moisture in the dough as in a sugar cookie recipe, that will create more steam that must escape in baking and the cookie recipe will need to be adapted accordingly.
•The larger the proportion of butter there is in a cookie recipe, the greater the spread will be when the cookie is baked.
•The more creamy white shortening (typically sold in a can or now even in “butter flavor” sticks), the less spread there will be when a cookie is baked. Manufacturers do sell “butter flavored shortening” to use in some recipes to try to mimic the flavor of butter, yet provide the stability of a more solid fat that shortening can offer.
•Margarine has an even lower melting point than butter, which has a lower melting point than creamy white shortening does.
•If you want a butter cookie to hold its shape, you could substitute some creamy white “shortening” or “butter flavored shortening” that is solid at room temperature for some of the butter in the recipe. This utilizes a concept called the “plasticizing” or “hydrogenation” of fats. “Plasticizing” or “hydrogenation” is why creamy white shortening doesn’t “melt” per se at room temperature.
–Note that this substitution is not improving the nutritional fat profile of the cookie and from a health standpoint would NOT be preferable, but from a baker’s standpoint is something that is done all the time in many commercial baking operations.
•Temperature of any dough with butter +/or margarine in it prior to baking will also affect cookie spread when baked.
•Chilling any partially hydrogenated fat (as in some margarines) or saturated fat (as in butter) thoroughly will allow the cookie to hold its best shape while baking.
–This is true not only for butter cookies, but also for both rolled sugar cookies and drop sugar cookies as well that contain butter +/or other saturated fats or partially hydrogenated fats (stick margarines).
•Some cookie recipes will even call for freezing the sheets of raw, portioned out ready-to-bake cookie dough for 20-30-40 minutes (less time for smaller diameter cookies; more time for larger diameter cookies) before baking them off.
We mentioned this in our 30Nov2011 blog post concerning Developing Flavor Notes in Cookies, which focused on why to refrigerate raw chocolate chip cookie batter 1-2 days before baking it off, and also mentioned the “cookie clone” recipes out there that attempt to duplicate the famous Mrs. Field’s chocolate chip cookies which are a take off on the Original Toll House cookies made famous by Ruth Graves Wakefield.
–The link provided to the NY Times article which reportedly quoted from the 1953 Toll House Cook Book also mentioned how some NYC bakeries that produce 1,000 cookies a day, bake them off in smaller batches throughout the day so that the cookies are always fresh when customers arrive at the bakery.
Those cookies are what we might call ginormous as they are very large (made from dough balls that are flattened and can weigh as much as 6 oz each, although some are 3.5 oz each).
Basically those types of very large cookies (which contain a LOT of fat and a LOT of calories, just FYI), have what one might describe as 3 rings of texture/flavor notes. The outer ring is crispy, the inner ring is softer and slightly gooey, and the middle ring is where all textures & flavor notes combine/blend/meld together. The incredible sensory appeal of those cookies is partly behind their enormous popularity.
Even smaller diameter cookies, however, can have a crispier outer ring and a softer center, with just less middle area in between. We aim for cookie portions that are closer to 1-2 oz. max.
• Just a thought — the “less is more” principle: since a little bit of a really delicious tasting baked good can be very satisfying, with great sensory enjoyment, why not eat less and savor it more? We feel that can be preferable to eating a lot of a lower quality product. Eating less will probably save you a lot of calories, too!